Design Resources from Dustin Lee

Type

Looking to add a bit of retro coolness to your designs? Designer Dustin Lee delivers the goods with his trifecta of retro design resources that aim to roughen and toughen up your unfinished designs. If Dustin’s name sounds familiar it may be because we featured his stellar badges in our Great Logotype Badges post as well.

We’re quite the admirers of Dustin who calls Palo Alto, California home. We first fell in love with his RetroPress Photoshop action and now we can’t take our eyes off of his recent releases RetroSupply (a digital toolkit for creating authentic retro looking design) and RetroLift (it makes it super easy to make any font 3-D). If you are looking to speed up your workflow and achieve a stunning, yet subtle retro grunge look to your projects, then you’ll be happy with any of Dustin’s resources.

You can find any of Dustin’s most recent design resources on: Creative Market

“Retropress makes it easy and fun to add an authentic retro printing press look to your designs. Just select your artwork, click a RetroPress action and you have a retro look in seconds.

Retropress includes these useful actions:

Ink Viscosity – Ink soaks into paper and spreads based on how thick it is. That’s called viscosity and
it’s essential to getting a realistic print effect. Retropress gives you three viscosity actions (light,
medium, and heavy.

Roughness – Look at a printed newspaper or magazine from circa 1950 really close, you’ll see the edges of the ink aren’t smooth but have a slightly rough edge. This subtle touch
if often missed when designer try to create a retro print effect. Retropress includes 3 roughness
settings.

Ink Texture – When ink soaks into paper it flows over the small paper fibers and pools in between. This
creates a subtle texture. With Retropress you get an easy to use action that let’s you adjust the
intensity as you see fit.

Halftone – Back in the day you’d find halftone printing everywhere (images created from small dots).
RetroPress gives you an authentic halftone effect in black ink and color.

This set took a massive amount of time to create and the diversity of aged effects you can create is truly astounding.

This set was also a major labor of love. Here’s what went into it:

• Over 30 hours of research, scanning, destroying, processing, and compiling the raw materials.
• 60+ year old paper from World War II. Literally, from the ships.
• Interviewed and researched some of the best designers with a retro style.
• 1 hour at a Kinko’s copying wrinkled and black paper while the lady stares at me.”

• Over 30 hours of research, scanning, destroying, processing, and compiling the raw materials.
• 60+ year old paper from World War II. Literally, from the ships.
• Interviewed and researched some of the best designers with a retro style.
• 1 hour at a Kinko’s copying wrinkled and black paper while the lady stares at me.”